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I don't know your exact budget as it's not detailed but Axis has made quality webcams for >15 years (I've got a 2100 from ~2000 and it's still running fine) and they support ftp uploading. The small M10s are dirt cheap, but work well. Check out http://www.axis.com/products/m... to see. If you want something fancier look at their higher priced offerings with better features. I don't work there, own stock, resell them, etc, but I've had great luck with their cameras for a really long time.

If you don't care to 'win' the fight w/ comcast, then go get a budget ($1/month) VPS running CentOS like from somewhere cheap like Crissic or Ramnode and use it to route your outbound email. It'll cost you less in actual dollars than your time investment in fighting comcast to date at minimum wage or that you'll spend reading the comments on this 'ask me anything' I figure:)

Background: I've professionally administered Unix and Linux machines for >25 years, including various BSDs, Linuxes, Irix, HP-UX, Solaris/SunOS, AIX, etc. I've been certified by several vendors or distributions, including, since 1999, Red Hat (which gives me quite a bit of background on their specific implementations over the years). I don't work for a company doing development of any OS or platform. heck, other than random 401K type aggregate ownership, I don't own stock in any company that cares about this issue at a deep level, to the best of my knowledge:)

Personal Bias about this thread: You pretty much lose all the credibility possible with me when you start of with "I... dislike systemd because... it looks... like a poorly-described, gigantic mess I know nothing about...." (It's the "disliking something you know nothing about" that bugs me). Otherwise, I don't care much about this debate on a personal level. I currently admin boxes using systemd as well as everything else, and nothing about systemd has caused me anywhere near the heartache that it seems people who haven't used it much seem to feel about it.

Seriously, there're thousands of pages of documentation about what it is, how it works, and what most if not all of the design basis decisions are/were. I'll link you to a few of them because hey, you can get to slashdot and post, but you can't seem to use Google;) (tongue in cheeck, of course). There're plenty of folks who DO have great detailed reasons on why they don't like bits and pieces of it, and you should be able to compare them to the various info I'm linking below.

Systemd has tons of upside and tons of downside. Most are pretty well detailed, although many of the gut reactions people seem to have to it are based on a lack of understanding about how it works and what it's compatible with, to wit "I can't use shell scripts for anything at startup anymore!" , "All of my old chkconfig or SysV scripts can't be included at all!", "It kills off syslog!", "The only reason it exists is to make laptops boot faster and in the server world we don't care", etc. Those are easily researched and the actual basis (or lack thereof) pretty easily found.

So, for why the systemd setup looks like it does, you can go back 4.5 years to where the announcement and rationale is described. Speed is part of it, as is device changability, as is double-forking, resource limits, and service state checking and recovery. Yes, it's a load of stuff. Definitely a system-wide approach VS a semi-random collection of various ways to do things all tacked together (which is, frankly, what most Unix and Unixlike systems are, through survival of the fittest).

Google "250-XXXXXXXA asa cisco starttls" and you'll find this is almost certainly an ASA preventing TLS as configured on the device. Since it doesn't want TLS traffic, the config is to just mangle the packets. Well known effect, been around for years (5+). The FW admin needs to correctly deploy fixup, allow TLS or simply not inspect esmtp. Simple fix, documented in Cisco doc 118550, among many other places.

Just buy a dropcam; WiFi, 2 way audio, powered via supplied microUSB cable and wall wart, and even lets you use it as a security camera and such the rest of the time. I don't work for them, etc but I own a couple and they work.

I have to agree about the lower average UIDs; this is my 'new' account when I wanted to use a nickname people would recognize me by, so I retired my 'old' account. It became a bit amusing once the UIDs got thru the roof!

Rob (And Hemos and ChrisD since they're reading) Thanks so much for all the hard work and effort./. is truly one of the cornerstones of the 'modern' geek internet (and this from a guy who watched the WANK worm stumble across VAX DECNET machines and saw the RTM worm do it's little dance aOL and dealt with "Do Not Spindle" cards *gets out his walker*).

Thanks, Guys. And why isn't there a poll up with options? My choice isn't there!

Maybe Vyatta @ http://www.vyatta.org/ does what you want. I really don't have any idea what that is from the actual post, tho. You need some routing for thousands of users, and can't afford a Cisco UBR. I'm not sure exactly if you wanted to use the UBR for DOCSIS type support for some reason (a la cable modem) but the fact it'll be wireless leads me to believe it won't be. I'm assuming you don't need a lot of physical ports, just something to manage your VLANS, some routed subnets, a bit of BGP, etc. Maybe XORP is what you want, tho @ http://www.xorp.org/ so you may want to look there. IHeck, 'm not even sure if you want to take a server with a bunch of PCIe ports and slam multiport switchable fabric cards in there like the ones DSS @ http://www.dssnetworks.com/v3/gigabit_pcie_6468.asp makes, or do something else. Maybe these links will help, and hopefully there'll be a detailed followup so we can aim at the real target:)

CWmike (1292728) writes "In a morning press call on Thursday, Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was stepping down as head of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. In his place, Jane Silber, the current Chief Operating Officer who has been with Canonical since 2004, will take over as CEO. Shuttleworth added that he will not, in any way, shape, or form be leaving Ubuntu. In an interview, Shuttleworth said that he's will stay head of the Ubuntu Community Council and the Ubuntu Technical Board. Instead of managing the business, he will be "Working closely on product design and our enterprise customers. I will also be working more closely with partners, especially in Asia. I will also work more closely with larger enterprise customers in our new cloud offerings. I will be spending more time on the areas that interest me the most and where I feel I can do the most good." Neither Ubuntu nor Canonical will be changing its direction. Looking ahead Shuttleworth will still set the overall goals, but Silver will be in charge of implementing the strategy to reach these goals and day-to-day business management."Link to Original Source

adeelarshad82 (1482093) writes "Google recently announced that they plan on launching a new phone which their employees are currently testing out. Reuters reports that the phone will be available on Jan 5, 2010 and that Google plans to sell two versions of the phone. One with a service contract with T-Mobile USA and another that is unlocked via Google’s website. The misconception, as PCMag’s Sascha Segan points out, is that people incorrectly assume that the phone will somehow “disrupt” the wireless industry or be their messiah who will save them from their wireless carriers by letting them choose any carrier for the unlocked phone. Given that FCC and GCF have approved the phone for T-Mobile, the only important thing that seems to be separating the locked phone from the unlocked is the contract itself. Unfortunately for those who wanted an unlocked phone for every network might have to continue to wait."

Plurk previously accused Microsoft of stealing its code, and Microsoft has admitted to it. Now, Plurk has issued an official response to Microsoft's apology, and it isn't pretty. The startup is hinting that it wants to hold Redmond accountable. Apparently, Microsoft went to great lengths to the steal the code, according to Plurk: "This event wasn't just a simple matter of merely lifting code; due to the nature of the uniqueness of our product and user interface, it took a good amount of deliberate studying and digging through our codes with the full intention of replicating our product user experience, functionality, and end results.""

Guess this puts my family in the computer era of 1981 or so. Yup, I'm a geek. It still works. Gave away the TI-99/4a, the C64, and the Original Nintendo, plus the Amiga, the Vic, the TRS80 model 1 and 2s, etc over the years, all working. The C64 is still in use by my boss for giggles for his kids:)

First Note: I was in Boy Scouts. Yes, I know, now it's evil, But I'm proud of it, to those detractors; while I now disagree w/ many of their policies since I'm older and 'get it', I still am happy to have had the chance to be part of it; if it helps, our scout troop must have been in willful violation of the rules, as we had some alternative lifestyle scouts, and a female scoutmaster, and it was never an issue, so YMMHV.

On to the story: My final year at camp was a bit of a goof-trip, since I'd already made eagle, had more badges than I needed, and I was going to be taking swimming, rowing and canoeing, and doing the mile swim, for example. None of these were really mentally taxing, to say the least, but they *were* going to be relatively physically demanding. Since the other guys in the senior patrol were geeks as well, we decided to make an endurance test of it. I was the chosen test subject, with each of them volunteering to help. I stayed awake the entire week, while completing my badges and the swim, with a different guy 'on shift' each night to help observe the behavior of someone going thru all the loopy stages of being awake for days. We played roll-playing games, listened to music, worked on paperwork for the troop, fished for raccoons, you name it. I made it through, and turned out thru a serious of drop-offs to be the last man home. My folks were at the college campus where my older brother was doing a summer program. I walked in the front door of the house, made it a few steps inside, and passed out:) I woke up a few minutes later, sore from the pack crushing me into the carpet, dragged my tail to the basement to chuck laundry in and then fell into the tub, passed out till the cold water woke me up, made a sammich, ate it, and fell into bed. I was up and at 'em the next morning, and back to my usual schedule, after almost 8 days w/o sleep.

Effects I observed: Obviously, at first you get really, really tired. Then you get cranky. We jokingly referred to this as the toddler stage. That said, once you get thru it, you start to get that second wind, and you're fairly wired. A few days in, you CAN start to hear odd things. Not sounds, ghosts, etc, but sometimes what people say isn't what you heard, and it requires some repetition. At night, you WILL convince yourself you've seen things that aren't there. Since I had a wingman to use as a sanity check, it wasn't scary, but I can imagine if I'd been in that state, alone, I'd have been one paranoid SoB. At a certain point, you can tell your body has realized you are NOT going to sleep, and it starts to make up for it to some extent. You're hungrier, and you can just generally feel that you're burning more energy w/o that downtime (part of that was due to the amount of physical exertion I was doing, too).

The final collapse was a BIG shock, tho. I literally walked thru the door, turned and waved, shut the door as they drove off, pivoted on my heel and *darkness*. I can only assume my brain said "You're home, we're done". I slept about 12-14 hours all told between my little carpet nap, the tub and then bed that night. After that, I was good to go.

Now, I'm normally a high-wired guy. I average 6 hours a night of sleep, and commonly get by on 4 for days at a time, and will 'recharge' with a 10 hour weekend night sleep-in on a Saturday or Sunday. This was definitely the limit of what I could do, at least once my brain said "You're home and safe". In a pinch, and in a true emergency, it might be possible to go longer, but I can only imagine that there's a point when you literally can't abuse the system any more.

Oh, for those curious, we didn't even tend to have sodas as camp, so this was done w/o caffeine (other than in candy), any no-doze, or any other kind of stimulant to artificially wire my system. Kool-Aid was on the list, so sugar was a definite go:)

Hope that helps for anyone curious about it:) I'm sure there are much more serious sleep-dep studies out there, but this is the only one I can provide first-hand!